ServiceChannel
Modified on
November 6, 2026
Table of Contents
As President Eisenhower once said, “planning is everything.” This rings true for facilities management, as pre-scheduled repair and maintenance efforts work to keep equipment functioning optimally and reducing downtime.
Facilities managers know that preventive maintenance should be performed, yet they often have trouble organizing all of the factors needed for success; constantly scheduling work orders, monitoring contractors, and sorting through invoices is extremely time-consuming and lends to unnecessary spending. That’s where preventive maintenance management comes in.
Key Takeaways:
- Preventive maintenance management keeps planned maintenance on time, on track, and documented, covering assets, schedules, work orders, costs, and compliance.
- Preventive maintenance software is usually part of a CMMS. Schedules automatically create work orders, and the work order system handles assignment, completion, and recordkeeping.
- Each PM task follows the same path: scheduled, work order created, assigned, completed and verified, then invoiced and reported.
- Software streamlines the program with recurring work orders, real-time monitoring, automated invoicing, and cost dashboards.
- A well-run program reduces risk to people and property and makes maintenance spending easier to predict.
What is Preventive Maintenance Management?
Preventative maintenance management is a system facilities managers use to keep their preventative maintenance on-time, on track, and well-documented. This can include tracking assets like equipment, vehicles, stores, buildings, and inventory, as well as scheduling repairs and maintenance, monitoring work orders, tracking and managing costs, and adhering to compliance standards. Having an established and smooth preventative maintenance management system increases efficiency, reduces spending, and leaves facilities managers to focus on other critical initiatives.
Types of Preventative Maintenance Management
How can you make your preventative maintenance as smooth, efficient, and consistent as possible? It all starts with a management plan. Depending on your objectives and priorities, your preventative maintenance management strategy could include one, several, or all of these key types of preventative maintenance management.
1. Plan Development
If you currently have minimal preventative maintenance or if you’re using an informal, “we’ll figure it out as we go” approach, it’s all but guaranteed that you’re missing important maintenance tasks. One of the most fundamental types of preventative maintenance management involves putting together a cyclical, clear, step-by-step plan that covers all the essential preventative tasks you need to perform. Depending on your facilities operations, you could separate your plan by systems or put it all together into one strategy.
2. Task Tracking
Having a well-planned maintenance strategy is only effective if your team is following that strategy. This is where the second type of preventative maintenance management comes in: task tracking. This method involves breaking down your maintenance plan into a series of tasks, each scheduled for specific dates to align with best practices and your systems’ needs. Your team members will need to mark off each task as they complete it so you can verify and document that you’re keeping up with the preventative care your facilities need.
3. Inspection Planning
Inspections are a cornerstone of preventative maintenance, and each system or component throughout your facilities needs inspections at different intervals. Inspection planning is a type of preventative maintenance management that schedules and tracks all the necessary inspections for your facilities. These can include external inspections needed for code compliance as well as internal inspections to identify potential problems.
4. Budget Alignment
Preventative maintenance is largely meant to save money in the long run, but it’s important to make sure you’re conducting your maintenance efficiently enough to stay on track with those savings. Budget alignment is a type of preventative maintenance management that tracks the cost of each maintenance task and inspection, comparing it against your projected budgets.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Preventative Maintenance Management
Preventative maintenance management can be a promising but potentially significant investment for your business, so weighing the pros and cons is a vital step in deciding how to move forward. Consider these top advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages of Preventative Maintenance Management
Preventative maintenance management has the power to make significant improvements to your facilities operations both in the short term and in the long term. With a well-formed strategy, you stand to gain a variety of benefits:
- Ensuring that facilities are maintained properly and that all systems are getting the preventative upkeep they need.
- Keep costs low by tracking spending on preventative maintenance to ensure that it aligns with the allotted budget.
- Document the preventative maintenance measures you’ve taken as a way to justify costs to stakeholders and, in the case of system failures or problems, to prove that you took reasonable precautions to prevent it.
- Create a well-documented and well-operated preventative maintenance plan to make transitions easier when you have employee turnover.
- Align preventative tasks on a master schedule to distribute them across your calendar in a manageable way rather than risking numerous tasks falling due on the same day.
- Plan your maintenance tasks in alignment with your staffing so you can identify when you have a need for additional staff members.
Disadvantages of Preventative Maintenance Management
As beneficial as preventative maintenance management can be, it does require something of you before you start reaping the rewards. Consider these potential disadvantages:
- You’ll need to take time out from your day-to-day maintenance work to create a strategy and put together a way to put it into action.
- The smoothest preventative maintenance management will come from using tools that were created for this purpose, and these tools come with an added cost.
- It could take additional supervisory oversight, particularly in the early weeks, to ensure that your team is following the preventative maintenance plan and using the management software appropriately.
The key fact to note when weighing the pros and cons of preventative maintenance management is that while the disadvantages are primarily short-lived, the advantages can be long-term game-changers for your business or your facilities team.
How Preventative Maintenance Management Reduces Risk
One of the most critical benefits to preventative maintenance management is its ability to minimize risks for your organization. This alone makes preventative maintenance management critical in keeping your business financially and legally stable and sustainable.
Risk to People
Poorly maintained equipment and facility systems pose severe threats to your employees and contractors. When you aren’t managing your preventative maintenance thoroughly, equipment is more likely to malfunction, potentially in dangerous ways. This can vary from obvious dangers like a malfunction in an industrial shredder to less clear yet still serious dangers such as the health hazards of a non-functional or moldy HVAC system.
Risk to Property
In addition to keeping personnel safe, preventative maintenance management lowers the risk to your property and financial assets. There are many types of equipment failures that can cause extensive damage to your property, like water damage or a fire. On a smaller scale, preventative maintenance management typically helps your equipment and building systems last longer so you reduce the cost of repairs and replacements in the long term.
In fact, preventative maintenance management even lowers the risk to your assets by lowering the risk to people. Certainly, you want your employees to be safe and well out of simple empathy, but injuries and illnesses can hurt your finances too. If poor maintenance management leads to an injury or illness, not only do you have the cost of the employee’s recovery time but you are likely to be legally responsible too, and this can be costly.
Why Preventive Maintenance Matters
Without preventive maintenance management, your organization is at greater risk for equipment failure, which is costly due to both repair spend and revenue loss from lost productivity. Facilities managementFM software helps facilities managers perform preventive maintenance, keeping facilities in top working condition.
This not only improves the efficiency of facilities managersFMs, but also improves the experiences of customers who visit locations kept in optimal shape. Customers place importance on how a commercial business looks, whether it is clean or not, and how it appears to be run. These on-site experiences directly impact the customer’s perception of the brand (hence, the importance of maintaining brand uptime).
Thus, it’s imperative that businesses maintain the best outward appearance to create exceptional customer experiences. Preventive maintenance management helps businesses to achieve this at the lowest possible cost.
How Does Preventive Maintenance Software Integrate With a CMMS or Work Order System?
Preventive maintenance software is usually the scheduling part of a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), not a separate tool. When a PM task comes due, the schedule creates a work order, and the work order system handles assignment, completion, and records. ServiceChannel helps multi-site teams schedule preventive maintenance, assign it to service providers or in-house technicians, and track completion.
How PM Software, a CMMS, and Work Orders Fit Together
Each piece has a different job:
- Preventive maintenance software stores each asset’s recurring tasks and how often they’re due, by date, run hours, meter readings, or equipment condition. It decides when work needs to happen.
- A CMMS is the system of record for assets, maintenance history, parts, and costs. PM scheduling and work orders usually both live inside it.
- A work order system, also called work order management software, turns each due task into a job someone is assigned, completes, and closes out with notes, photos, and time on site.
When PM scheduling and work orders run in separate products, they’re connected so a due task opens a work order automatically and completion details flow back to the asset’s record.
From PM Schedule to Closed Work Order, Step by Step
Here’s how a single preventive maintenance task moves through the system. Each step is part of the work order lifecycle, so nothing depends on someone remembering to create or chase a job.
| Step | What the software does | What gets recorded |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Schedule | Stores the task, asset, and frequency set in your preventive maintenance schedule and flags the task when it comes due. | Asset, task list, and due date |
| 2. Work order created | Automatically creates the work order with the asset’s details, instructions, photos, and compliance requirements attached. | Work order number, scope, priority, and due date |
| 3. Assigned | Routes the work order to an in-house technician or a service provider for that site and trade. | Who owns the work and when it’s due |
| 4. Completed and verified | The technician checks in and out on site, adds notes or photos, and closes the work order. | Arrival and completion times, labor, parts, and findings |
| 5. Invoiced and reported | Matches the invoice to the work order and adds the cost to dashboards and reports. | Cost by asset, site, trade, and provider; PM completion rate |
Findings from step 4 feed back into step 1. If technicians keep finding the same issue with an asset, adjust its task list or frequency.
Grocery chain Tops Market used ServiceChannel to roll out a preventive maintenance program across more than 160 stores. With GPS check-in data confirming each visit, the team now completes 88% of its preventive maintenance on schedule and has improved its vendor check-in rate by 23%.
Connecting Your CMMS to Other Systems
Many teams also connect their CMMS to systems outside maintenance so they don’t have to enter data twice. Common connections include:
- Accounting or ERP systems to send approved invoices for payment and keep budgets current.
- Building automation systems and equipment sensors, so a reading outside its normal range can open a work order.
- Property and asset records, so new sites and equipment are added to PM schedules without rekeying.
Before connecting two systems, decide which one owns each record (e.g., the asset list) so they don’t overwrite each other. Then test with one site or one asset type before rolling it out everywhere.
How to Streamline Your Preventive Maintenance Management
Facilities maintenance software can help you streamline your preventive maintenance management program, discover the top four ways below.
1. Create Recurring Work Orders
Facilities management software not only allows for work orders to be created and sent digitally, but it also allows facilities managers to schedule recurring work orders. Using this feature, facilities managers do not need to make new work orders whenever preventive maintenance should be performed, saving time.
Additionally, facilities management software has the ability to store photos, descriptions, and compliance requirements of various assets, which can be included in recurring work orders. This gives service workers a detailed knowledge of what type of work needs to be done and when.
2. Real-Time Monitoring
With facilities management software, facilities managers are able to view all preventive maintenance management efforts via calendars by location and preventive maintenance reports. Also, facilities management software can be used to validate preventive work via GPS check-in and check-out. These features give you the ability to monitor planned maintenance work from anywhere, reducing travel between locations and time spent physically watching over contractors.
3. Automated Invoicing
Another important capability of facilities management software is electronic invoicing. This can auto-generate invoices based on predetermined rates each time preventive maintenance is scheduled. It can then be sent to and completed by the contractor digitally, reducing paper and processing costs. Because preventive maintenance is done regularly and therefore results in many invoices, streamlining your preventive maintenance management enables quick and accurate invoicing processes.
4. Cut Costs
The analytical dashboards within facilities management software help give visibility into preventive maintenance spend by trade, category, provider, and other dimensions. When facilities management software reports on this data, it can expose trends and areas in which spend can further be utilized.
Additionally, the advanced knowledge of upcoming planned services that preventive maintenance management provides helps facilities managers keep costs in line.
The Future of Preventative Maintenance Management
Preventative maintenance management has a promising future of advancement and innovation thanks to ever-evolving artificial intelligence. As AI technology grows, we can expect to see more and more remote monitoring capabilities and predictive analytics tools that alert you to potential issues and wear on your systems so you can repair them before they fail.
The internet of things (or IoT) is another bright spot in the future of preventative maintenance management. Connecting vital systems digitally to preventative maintenance management software or other platforms allows you to keep a constant eye on your systems and streamline your preventative maintenance. The future is bright thanks to this ongoing advancement and growth.
Getting Started with Preventative Maintenance Management
At this point, you have an understanding of top concepts and questions like “What is preventative maintenance?” and “What does preventative maintenance involve?” What is the next step?
Getting started with developing and launching your preventative maintenance management program all begins with the right tools. Learn more about ServiceChannel’s user-friendly preventative maintenance management platform and put it to use for your team.
Learn more about including preventive maintenance initiatives within your facilities management.
Not exactly. A CMMS is the broader system for managing assets, work orders, parts, and maintenance costs. Preventive maintenance software handles scheduling recurring tasks and creating work orders when they come due. Some tools handle PM scheduling on their own, but most teams use it inside a CMMS.
Usually, yes. If PM scheduling and work orders run in separate tools, you can connect them through a built-in connector or an API, so a due task opens a work order automatically and completion details flow back to the schedule. Start by deciding which system owns each record, then test the connection with one site or one asset type before expanding.
Check the work order, not the schedule. A closed work order should show who did the work, when they arrived and left, what they found, and any parts used. Check-in and check-out records and completion photos make that easy to verify across many sites without visiting each one.
It usually covers four areas: building a recurring maintenance plan, breaking that plan into scheduled tasks your team marks complete, scheduling and tracking inspections, and comparing each task’s spend against your budget. Software ties these together so schedules, work orders, records, and spending stay in one place.
Most of the spend comes up front. It takes time to build the plan, purpose-built software adds to the spend, and teams may need extra oversight in the first few weeks while they adjust. The spend is mostly short-lived, while fewer breakdowns, better records, and steadier spending last.
